Friday, June 13, 2014

The inevitable collapse of professional sports in America

If I were a betting man, I'd be going short on any pro sports entity in North America.

Big time sports entertainment depends on a viable middle class market to buy the seats.

We'll always have the TMZ fodder filling the court-side seats at the NBA finals, but what's happening in the rest of the arena?

Geriatric racist Donald Sterling should grab that two billions on offer and run for the hills, because in a few years an NBA franchise isn't going to worth more than a KFC franchise. Maybe less, because we gonna have to eat long after we give up on b'ball.

And seriously, where is the PGA gonna find its market in ten or twenty years? Have a good look at the crowd at Pinehurst this weekend. What do you see? Lots of middle-class middle-aged retired white folks. That's an endangered species.

Going forward, middle aged white folks are more likely to be clerking at the A&P than spending a week at a PGA event.

That's because the "job creators" that the entire Washington elite has been championing with tax breaks and government contracts for the last fifty years has stashed the breaks in offshore tax havens and created only min wage jobs with no benefits.

The folks who find themselves in those jobs don't find themselves at professional sporting events; NBA, NHL, PGA, or whatever.

One of the most visible manifestations of the dwindling market for big time sports is NASCAR. Watch a race these days and you'll see vast swaths of empty bleachers. Ten years ago all those bleachers were filled with paying customers.

All professional sporting leagues in North America were premised on a middle class market with disposable income.

Absent that, those professional sports leagues will soon be as dead as the middle class.